Material Assembly Members
Katherine Hubble
Kyoko Imazu
Claire McArdle
Lindy McSwan
Sam Mertens
Michaela Pegum
Nicole Polentas
Steven Rendall
Sarah Tomasetti
Michael Trudgeon
Nicholas Bastin
Helen Britton
Sue Buchanan
Yi Jen Chu
Jazmina Cininas
Mark Edgoose
Andrew Gunnell
Rosie Gunzburg
Richard Harding
Kirsten Haydon
Member Biographies
Helen Britton
Helen Britton is a Multidisciplinary Australian artist based in Munich, Germany. Her practice creates jewellery and objects, drawings, stencils and installations, and is informed by popular culture and folk art, disappearing traditions on the backdrop of a strong underlying influence of her natural Australian environment. Helen completed a Master of Fine Arts by research at Curtin University, Western Australia in 1999, which included guest studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, and San Diego State University, California. In 1999 she returned to Munich to complete postgraduate study at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 2002 she established her Studio in Munich with David Bielander and Yutaca Minegishi. In March of 2011 Helen Drutt-English launched a new catalogue of Helen Britton’s work in Munich. In 2013 at the invitation of The Neue Sammlung, Munich, an overview of 20 years of Helen's work was shown as a solo exhibition in the Neues Museum, Nürnberg, Germany. In 2013 Britton was awarded the Förder Preis of the city of Munich, and in 2014 was artist in residence at Villa Bengel in Idar-Oberstein. In 2017 Helen created the exhibtion "Intersticies" at The Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, UWA, Western Australia - a complete overview of her practice in conjunction with the Festival of Perth, including her large scale drawing works, Ghost Train installation and a selection of small sculpture and objects. In 2019 Helen Britton was made adjunct Professor of RMIT University in Melbourne. In 2020 Helen was invited by the Bavarian Chamber of Crafts to curate Schmuck for the International handwerksmesse. In 2021 Elena Alvarez-Lutz released her documentary film Hunter from Elsewhere, AJourney with Helen Britton at Dok.Fest Munich.
Susan Buchanan
Susan Buchanan was born on Woiwurrung country, also called Melbourne, Australia and has a background in Architecture and Fine Arts.
In architecture Sue has been an advocate for affordable housing through people-focussed building projects. These typically have multi-million-dollar budgets with many stakeholders and large consultant teams, as well as complex programming and delivery requirements. Enjoyed by the residents as well as receiving peer recognition through architectural awards, these works include the ground-breaking Ozanam House Homelessness Accommodation and Resource Centre and Rosanna Station.
Sue’s art practice is typically site-related and local, consistently exploring how we engage with our city environment – how it is signed, organised and occupied - and how this affects our sense of belonging. Works range from jewellery to collaborative large-scale interventions and she is currently undertaking a Masters by Research at RMIT to further investigate the use of urban materiality in jewellery forms and the processes of transfer from street to body.
Sue has exhibited nationally and internationally and was a finalist in the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture 2011 and 2017 with Eli Giannini as SUPERPLEASED – a long-standing collaborative relationship. Sue has an established studio practice in Docklands and supports other makers through the Bluestone Collective.
Instagram @suebuchanan8
Yi Jen Chu
Yi Jen Chu is a current PhD candidate of Fine Art, Gold and Silversmithing at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, Melbourne, Australia. She completed a Master of Arts, Jewellery, Silversmithing and Related Products at Birmingham City University (2016). Her works have been exhibited internationally throughout Europe, Asia and Australia. She was awarded the Diana Morgan Postgraduate and Honours Gold and Silversmithing prize in 2019.
Yi Jen’s practice centres on kinetic jewellery and objects, which form a narrative of excess in food production and consumption chain in contemporary culture, using interactive ways to simulate the conceptual meaning behind the objects.
Instagram @chuyijen1992
Mark Edgoose
Working at the intersections of craft, design and architecture and fuelled by an interest in both traditional and hi-tech materials, Dr Mark Edgoose has made a significant contribution to Australian object-making since 1989. A global expert in titanium, Mark’s material-driven research manifests in exhibitions that explore the form and metaphor of the rail, in its multiple definitions. These meticulously produced objects, created largely from titanium, enable Mark to explore his interest in craft objects as they exist in space and time – the rail is a linear structure that viewers experience by travelling along it.
Mark’s works also interrogate notions of form and function and experiment with new significations for an object – his rails reference ubiquitous forms in the world but they also offer unexpected delights and new possibilities. Iterations of the rail have been exhibited at the Cicely & Colin Rigg Contemporary Design Award (National Gallery of Victoria, 2012), Unexpected Pleasures (Design Museum, London and National Gallery of Victoria, 2012), Melbourne Now (National Gallery of Victoria, 2013) and Victorian Craft Award, Melbourne, 2019. Mark completed his PhD in 2015, focusing on the space and habitation aspects of the craft object.
Andrew Gunnell
Andrew Gunnell is an Australian artist with a practice located at the intersections of print, photo and paint.
Current studio practice is informed by themes such as the impact of digitisation on representations of natural phenomena and contemporary landscape. Where internal and external evocations of time are imagined through an investigation of the interfaces between analogue and digital image construction processes.
He has participated in over 70 solo and group exhibitions. His work is held in public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Asia Pacific Photographic Archive, the Hong Kong Open Print Workshop, and the State Library of Victoria.
Andrew Gunnell is a Lecturer in the Print Studio of the School of Art at RMIT University.
Kirsten Haydon
Kirsten Haydon investigates the potential of gold and silversmithing to communicate human experience and connections with the environment. Kirsten Haydon completed a PhD in 2009 and has been teaching at the School of Fine Art, RMIT University in Melbourne since 2002. Her teaching and research advance knowledge in the areas of enamelling and installation for object-based practice. In 2004, Kirsten travelled as a New Zealand Antarctic Arts Fellow to Antarctica for her doctoral research project, Antarctic landscapes in the souvenir and jewellery.
Claire McArdle
Claire has held over ten solo exhibitions including, three overseas in Estonia, Germany and Thailand. In 2017 her exhibition Up North travelled to Gray Street Workshop, Adelaide, The Lost Ones Gallery, Ballarat and Gallerysmith Project Space in Melbourne. Her work has been exhibited in Thailand, Hong Kong, USA, UK, Germany, France, Estonia, Austria and The Netherlands. She has undertaken residencies in Australia, Mexico, Iceland and Estonia.
She won the Itami Award at the 2019 ITAMI International Jewellery Exhibition, The Museum of Arts and Crafts, Itami, Japan, first prize at both Contemporary Wearables '13 in 2013 and the National Contemporary Jewellery Award in 2016 and was received the Excellence Award at the Victorian Craft Awards in 2017. In 2018 her work was collected by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. She is currently undertaking a PhD at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Lindy McSwan
Lindy McSwan completed a BA (Fine Art) Honours in Gold and Silversmithing at RMIT in 2014. Assisted by an Australia Council for the Arts, ArtStart Grant she established her studio practice in 2015 as a resident at 1000 Degrees Glass Studio. Lindy was an Artist in Residence in the Bundanon Trust program in late 2017. She has participated in many selected group exhibitions, including several exhibitions with a focus on the vessel, including Containment, The National at Anna Miles Gallery, Auckland, Heavenly Vessels, Avid Gallery, Wellington, and Hold: Exploring the Contemporary Vessel, Gallery Funaki, Melbourne - all in 2017.
Lindy returned to RMIT in 2018 to commence a Master of Fine Art undertaking material focused practice-led research. Enamelled mild steel vessels responding to her first research field trip were exhibited for the first time at JOYA Barcelona 2018 and received the Alchimia Student Award. As part of the Radiant Pavilion Jewellery and Object Biennale, 2019, progress from her MFA research was presented in Lindy’s solo exhibition Ground. Most recently, June 2021, Lindy was one of three artists to exhibit in The Space of Emptiness at Craft Victoria situating her work in a broader community of practice.
Michaela Pegum
Michaela’s practice is an exploration of felt experience, garnered through the deeply embodied and poetic relationships we form with the natural world. Working across the realms of contemporary jewellery and sculpture, Michaela has a highly explorative material practice where she creates evocative textures and forms that speak back to the body in a language that is suggestive and sensory, exploring the qualities, tones and temporalities that constitute the fabric of relations between the sensing being and their environment.
Originally from New South Wales and now living in Melbourne, Michaela has a background and practice in contemporary dance and choreography, a Bachelor of Design (Honours) from UTS and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) Gold & Silversmithing from RMIT where she is also undertaking her PhD.
She is the recipient of a number of awards including the National Contemporary Jewellery Award, the Victorian Craft Awards - Lynne Kosky Jewellery Encouragement Award, the Fresh! Pieces of Eight Award, and the Contemporary Wearables Student Prize. She was selected for Schmuck in Munich, Germany and the Marzee International Graduate Show in the Netherlands and has exhibited both locally and internationally in Europe and Asia.
Steven Rendall
Steven Rendall’s work is littered with fragments of technology, art history, science fiction, horror movies and pop music. Materials, images and meanings are scavenged and rearranged via various methods involving painting, sculpture and video.
Rendall was born in the UK in 1969. He moved to Melbourne in 2000 where he currently lives and works. Steven Rendall is a lecturer in the School of Art at RMIT University. He completed a Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours) at DeMontfort University in Leicester, undertook post-graduate studies at the Royal Academy Schools in London and, despite adverse conditions, completed a PhD at Monash University in 2015.
Rendall has staged numerous exhibitions in Australia and the UK. His work is in various collections including The National Gallery of Victoria, The Monash University Collection, Artbank, RMIT University Art Collection, The City of Melbourne, St. Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne and St. Helier Hospital, London.
Sarah Tomasetti
Working with the agencies of pre-industrial materials such as lime putty and beeswax, Sarah Tomasetti’s practice is based in processes of labour and mimesis as a way of reconfiguring our cultural relationship to landscape in the Anthropocene. Her doctoral research looks at the way mountainous regions are imagined and traversed, and how the material language and reciprocal movements of art making can sensitise human relationship to the more than human world.
In 2015 she founded Peradam Projects together with artist Heather Hesterman, as a collaborative platform designed to engage communities in interactive art events held at the intersection of art, science and ecology.
Sarah’s work is held in a number of private, and public collections including Artbank, Macquarie Bank and Grafton, Tamworth, Wagga and Gippsland Regional Galleries. In 2020 she won the John Leslie prize for Landscape for Kailash from the Air.
Dr Michael Trudgeon
Dr Michael Trudgeon is a professor of design in the School of Design at RMIT University. He is the Deputy Director, of the Victorian Eco Innovation Lab [VEIL], founded at the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne where he taught into the international VEIL Eco-acupuncture design studio, teaching program taking Masters of Architecture design studios in Melbourne and overseas. At the MDIT program at RMIT he is responsible for delivering the Master of Design Innovation and Technology final design studio program. He has taught masters and undergraduate students in architecture, interior design, industrial design and graphic design since1983 at RMIT, the University of Melbourne, Swinburne and Monash University.
In practice he is the founding design director at Crowd Productions, a Melbourne based architecture and industrial design studio, incorporated in 1983. His practice background is focused on developing strategies to prototype new technology and spatial solutions for commercial architecture projects and sustainable servicing systems.